In a recent Slate article, Kean credited him with revealing “how we make memories personal and personally meaningful.”) And then there’s British musician Clive Wearing, whose memory lasts a mere 10 seconds or so. died early last month in a Toronto nursing home at age 62. So he remembered the fact of his brother’s wedding, to pick one example, but had no recollection of ever being there. who, because of damage to his hippocampus, couldn’t recall any memories of things he’d seen, done or felt (episodic memories), but could remember historical events (semantic memories). In another case, Kean tells us of a Toronto man known as K.C.

Kean is quick to point out that it’s unclear whether the tumour released an inborn desire for children or if it created it, but he does leave room for rethinking such behaviour if it suddenly occurs in the context of brain trauma. Ten months later, when he regresses, doctors operate again and find that the tumour has grown back. When the doctors remove it, his pedophilia vanishes. In one case, a man becomes attracted to children as a result of a tumour in his temporal lobe. Though not his primary purpose, time and again, Kean shows us how we all are products of our mental circuitry, and that a wound here or a blow there can turn us into different people, a rather sobering, if not humbling, thought. A woman in England has been declared dead three times and once woke up in the morgue, all because of faulty communication among the three major parts of the brain (the reptile, mammal and primate parts).

It’s what being reincarnated as a statue would feel like.” Eventually, by focusing all his energy, he can break out of it after a few minutes. “I fight, I struggle, I strain to twiddle a toe or flex a nostril, and it does no good.

Whenever he sleeps on his back Kean will awake in the morning and be unable to move any part of his body. More than once you will find yourself sitting with your mouth agape in complete wonder of the brain, an effect that begins with Kean’s own peculiar malady, something called sleep paralysis. In his entrancing new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, science writer Sam Kean burrows into the workings of an organ once deemed as unknowable as the far reaches of the galaxy, and does so with boyish charm, accessible language, a prodigious amount of enthusiasm and the sobering realization that throughout history a catastrophic brain injury has ghoulishly been the neuroscientists best friend.Īs he did in his previous books on DNA and the Periodic Table, Kean mixes incredible historical tales and case histories with the heavier slogging that wouldn’t be out of place in a classroom setting.

The tale of two dueling neurosurgeons